-^! 



I THE HIGHER EDUCATION: 




n 



J^ FLEjf^ 



MAKING IT ACCESSIBLE TO ALL 



AN ADDRK8S 



DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, 



Jzcne ^6, 1879. 



L 



JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D. 



PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY. 




ANN AKBOK, MlCil. : 

PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD OF KEdENTS. 

18 7 9. 




THE HIGHER EDUCATION; 



J^ FXj-B^J^ 



MAKING IT ACCESSIBLE TO ALL 



AN ADDRESS 

DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT 

OF THE 

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 
June m, 1879. 



BY 

JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. I)., 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY. 



ANN AliBOK, MICH. : 

PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD OF KEGENTS. 

18 7 0. 



>^CI 




-in-v YORK publ; libr. 

IN EXCHANQ^^, 



V 



The Higher Education: 

/ PLEA FOR MAKING IT ACCESSIBLE TO ALL, 



Gentlemen of the Board of Regents, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

Until within a few days we have cherished the hope of lis- 
tening at this hour to a distinguished scholar and orator from a 
sister State. But, unhappily, our hope has been disappointed. 
In this exigency the kindly urgency of my associates in the Uni- 
versity Senate has constrained me very unwillingly and after 
hurried preparation, to offer you some thoughts, which, I hope, 
may be found not unfitting the occasion. 

No one here can regret more profoundly than I the neces- 
sity w^hich calls you to listen to a voice so familiar as mine and 
and so suggestive, I fear, to my younger friends, of the recita- 
tion room and the daily routine of college life, rather than of 
the joys, the enthusiasms, the inspirations which this great festal 
day of the University should awaken in all hearts. Fortunately 
the success of this occasion does not depend on me. It is already 
assured in the spectacle, which has so perennial an interest, of a 
goodly company of young men and young women appearing 
upon this stage to receive their testimonials of work faithfully 
accomplished, and turning away to confront the stern duties of 
life, in this vast concourse of alumni and other friends of the 
University, and in the devotion to the dear mother of her chil- 
dren, who gather from distant homes under her ample roof tree, 
w^hile their hearts run together in the joy of a common love to 
her. 

As we assemble on these high days at these shrines of learn- 
ing, we instinctively call to mind those noble and farsighted 



statesmen to whose wise and generous forethought the greatness 
and the very existence of this institution are due. It should be 
one of our sacred duties, as well as delights, to imbue ourselves 
with the spirit in which they wrought for the founding of a 
free school of letters, science and arts. 

The story of this work is so familiar that I need not repeat 
it in detail. But let us keep clearly before us the important 
fact that the fathers who drafted and adopted that great charter 
of liberty and learning for the northwest, the Ordinance of '87, 
in which they declared that " schools and the means of educa- 
tion should forever be encouraged," carried, in their conception 
of a State, a distinct idea of a richly endowed university as a 
part of its furniture and its life. They and their successors in 
Congress provided for the support of such institutions in the 
nascent states of this region with what was then so munifi- 
cent generosity that clearly they expected the higher education 
would be within the easy reach of all. It may well be that even 
in their brightest dreams of the future of the territory which 
they were consecrating to freedom, to religion and to intelli- 
gence, they did not see that in less than a century, as the fruit- 
age of their sowing, in all these northwestern States schools and 
colleges should spring up like the stars in the sky for number. 
Still less, perhaps, did they imagine that before the centennial 
celebration of the birth of the nation there should arise and 
flourish in this State of Michigan, then an almost untrodden 
wilderness, fringed by a few weak settlements on the river and 
the lakes, a University which should surpass in the number of its 
students and teachers, the amplitude of its endowments and the 
wide reach of its influence, the Harvard, the Yale, the Princeton 
and the William and Mary of their day, and should win an 
honorable name on every continent of the globe. Yet this 
possibility, now become fact, lay coiled as a germ in the Ordin- 
ance of '87, t\i?it gentis cwmbula nostrae. 

The wise men who shaped the organization of this State 
steadily cherished the idea which was inherited from the fathers, 
of building a University in which their children, whether poor 



or rich, could obtain the higher culture of their minds. The 
plan of a university marked out by the territorial govern- 
ment in 1817 was one which for breadth and completeness of 
conception we can even now only admire. The language of the 
Constitution of 1835 shows that its framers had the broadest 
and most generous views of public j)rovision for the support of 
libraries, education, including higher education, and especially 
of the University. 

We may say, therefore, with strictest truth, that this idea 
of large and liberal supply of facilities not only for common 
school training, but also for University education, was inwrought 
into the very conception of the State of Michigan. It has 
from the beginning formed a part of the life of the State. 
It has never been lost, but has grown with the growth of the 
State, and strengthened with its strength. And it has, I believe, 
never had so firm a hold upon the State as it has to-day. 

In the light of accomplished results, when we consider how 
little the total cost of the University has been to the State, less 
than half a million of dollars, not more in fact than these build- 
ings and grounds and museums and libraries are worth; when we 
remember that it has sent forth 5,700 graduates, most of them 
persons of humble means, equipped for duty in all worthy call- 
ings of life; that the names and the works of its professors are 
known and respected on both sides of the Atlantic; that it is re- 
cognized, we may modestly say, as taking rank with the best, 
Universities in the land, and that it has helped in no small de- 
gree to make the name of Michigan known wherever the culti- 
vation of science and letters is respected, may we not gratefully 
and truly declare that the fathers, whose legislation made this 
career of the University possible, had an exalted and statesman- 
like conception of the duty of the State to the higher education. 

I think, therefore, I shall be acting in completest harmony 
with ihe true spirit of Michigan if I employ the hour assigned 
me this morning in enforcing and illustrating this truth: 

That it is of vital importance^ especially in a i-epublic^ that the 



— e — 

igher education^ as well as common school education^ be accessible to the 
poor as well as to the rich. 

Notice that this implies that either through public or pri. 
vate endowment the higher education shall be furnished at less 
than its cost. From time to time there appear some impractica- 
ble theorizers — and they are too numerous just now — who lift 
up their voices and invoke the economic laws of supply and de- 
mand and the laissez aller doctrine in condemnatiou of endow- 
ments of schools of learning. But if colleges and universities 
were required to exact of students fees which should fully repay 
the cost of instruction, the poor must, with few exceptions, be 
shut out from them. Should we say nothing of the interest on 
the capital represented in the real property of the average 
American college, it would cost each student from one hundred 
to two hundred dollars a year more than is now paid if the 
actual cost of the instruction were returned to the treasury of 
the institution. If the interest on the amount invested in the 
buildings, grounds, libraries and collections were to be made 
good by the fees for tuition, the annual cost to each student 
would probably be increased by from four hundred to six hun- 
dred dollars. 

Obviously the great mass of the men now in the colleges 
would be excluded. The higher education would be, as a rule, 
within reach of the rich alone. As it is, even now many are 
able to complete their course only by self-denial and by labors 
which are I'eally heroic. Now, what I affirm is that any arrange- 
ment that should leave the higher education accessible to the 
rich alone would be in the highest degree unwise. In suj^port 
of this statement I have to say: 

1. It is in itself fitting, and, in a certain sense, it is due to 
children as human beings, that the poorest child should have 
proper facilities for obtaining by reasonable effort the best de- 
velopment of his talent and character. I think I may appeal to 
the common sense and the general feeling of civilized men in 
recognition of this truth. One of the highest ends of society is 
to help men make the most of themselves. True, as I shall soon 



show, this is partly because it is for the interest of all, of society 
at large. But beyond that we instinctively recognize it as a 
duty to do what we can, both individually and through the or" 
ganized action of society, to open to every child — and for the 
child's own sake — a fair chance for the best start in life for 
which his talent fits him. I know that we often justify our pro- 
viding a free common school education simply by showing the 
necessity of such an education as a preparation for citizenship. 
But I believe that down in our hearts there is a profound satis- 
faction, and often an impelling motive to our action, in the con- 
viction that we are doing simply what is just, what is due to 
every child as a human being, in giving him an opportunity to 
kindle into a flame any divine spark of intelligence within him. 
Is it too much to say that the infant born into a civilized and 
Christian society has a right to claim something more than a 
bare possibility — has a right to claim a tolerable probability of 
such moi al and intellectual surroundings as shall make education 
and character accessible to him, if he has a fair amount of talent, 
self-denial and energy? For the moment I am not considering 
whether his claim should be met by legislation or by voluntary 
action. But that it should be met by society in some way, I 
think will be generally conceded. 

What more touching spectacle is there than that of an in- 
genuous and high-spirited youth, consumed with an insatiable 
thirst for knowledge, endowed with faculties that might make 
him the peer of the greatest, yet chained by the heavy hand of 
poverty through all his best years to the foot of the ladder, on 
which his aspiring soul would, if unfettered, so easily and so joy- 
ously have mounted to the stars. His indomitable energy may 
enable him at last, after years of heavy struggle, to attain a lofty 
height. But would not it be a blessed act, would it not be a 
just, and wise, and righteous act, to relieve him of so much of 
the struggle as is not needful for the discipline of his soul, and 
to secure to him as well as to society years of his most fruitful 
work? As the magnet draws the particles of steel from the 
dust and lifts them into view, so the common school system, 



stretching out its sensitive and generous hands to every child in 
this commonwealth, lifts the exceptionally gifted into notice, 
makes him and his friends cognizant of his power and his 
promise, kindles in him the flame of a noble ambition for learn- 
ing, and compels us to recognize the duty of society to smooth 
the way from the cradle of talent in the humblest log hut to the 
halls of the highest learning. To stimulate to the utmost the 
ambition of these pupils by your schools, to set their minds on 
tire with this unquenchable desire for ampler culture, and yet to 
make that culture practically inaccessible, to slam the door of 
the college in the face of every one who is poor, were illogical 
and cruel and unworthy your boasted civilization. 

2. But we need to make the higher education accessible to 
the poor, not merely on account of the poor and gifted scholars 
themselves, but also because this is best for society. We need 
all the intelligence, all the trained minds we can have. There is 
never a surplus of wisdom and true learning. There is often a 
surplus of pedantry. There is often an excess of false pride on 
tlie part of those who have not talent enough to shine in purely 
intellectual pursuits, and who foolishl}'^ hold themselves above 
the only pursuits for which, with all their advantages of educa- 
tion, their moderate mental endowments fit them. But these are 
merely incidental evils belonging to any system of higher educa- 
tion. Of strong, well-balanced, well-furnished minds we cannot 
have too many. They are the true riches of a nation. Without 
them the mines of El Dorado cannot make a people rich or 
strong. With them the dwellers on a desert may become pros- 
perous and invincible. 

Now, God bestows talent with impartial hand equally on 
the rich and the poor. He sows the seeds of genius in what 
might seem the unlikeliest spots. He often places the choicest 
jewels in the humblest settings. His rarest gifts of mind are 
dropped in the obscurest homes. As the son of Sirach has told 
us, " Wisdom lifteth up the head of liim that is of low degree, 
and maketh him to sit among great men." It was on an Ayrshire 
peasant that Heaven bestowed the power of the sweetest song that 



ever rose on the Scottish hills. It was to the blacksmith's son, the 
book-binder's apprentice, Faraday, that the electric currents, in 
their rapid and unseen flight, paused to reveal their secrets. It was 
given to a colliery fireman to harness steam to our chariots and 
bear us as on the wings of the wind across the continent, and so 
to revolutionize the commercial methods of the world. It was 
on a man whose origin is so obscure that his parentage can 
scarcely be traced, that God laid the responsibility and confer- 
red the power of leading us out of the disgrace of slavery and 
the blackness of darkness of civil war into the sweet light of 
true freedom and welcome peace. It is to a Michigan tele- 
graph boy that God lends so divine a vision that he sees and 
measures and harnesses to his service the subtlest forces of 
nature. The scientific savans of the world look on in wonder 
as at the command of Edison dumb matter speaks, the word 
which died away upon the empty air weeks ago gains a resurrec- 
tion and falls again upon our ear with a living voice. As dis- 
tant Arcturus, more than 1,600,000 times as far away from us as 
our sun, reports visibly to him the almost infinitesimal quantity 
of heat which its pencil of light, after traveling its weary jour- 
ney of more than five and twenty years, has brought with it to 
earth, we ask in amazement what revelation is next to be made 
through this interpreter, for whom nature seems to have lost her 
wonted coyness and secrecy. 

No nation is rich enough to spurn the help which God gives* 
in such rare minds as these, though their childhood is housed m 
hovels. No nation should be so short-sighted as to pile up ob- 
stacles in their path, or even to leave any which can be removed. 
As the husbandman at the foot of the western Sierras, at great 
cost and with infinite pains, makes a secure channel to bring 
the fertilizing mountain stream to his fields, guiding to it every 
rivulet which can swell its volume, and thus makes the parched 
desert blossom like the rose and wave with golden harvests, so 
may a nation well do much to smooth the way for its gifted 
children to enlarge their faculties, to enrich their minds, and 



— 10 — 

thus pour far and wide the beneficent streams of their influence, 
and give us richer harvests than those of corn, and wine, and oil. 

3. Again, we need to put the higher education within the 
reach of the poor, because we cannot aiford to endow the rich 
alone with the tremendous power of trained and cultivated 
minds. To do this might form an aristocracy of formidable 
strength. So long as the poor have anything like an equal 
chance with the rich of developing their intellectual power, we 
have little to fear from an aristocracy of wealth; but let wealth 
alone have the highest intellectual training, let the poor as a 
class be shut out from the schools of generous culture, and we 
must either consign the control of all intellectual and political 
life to the hands of the rich, or else have a constant scene of 
turbulence between the ignorant many and the enlightened few. 
Bitter class hatred would be inevitable. There can be no stable 
equilibrium, no permanent prosperity for such a society. 

Learning, too, would probably soon give place to pedantry, 
displayed like the ribbons and orders of a petty German court. 
The scholarship which is a mere concomitant and badge of 
wealth would become vain and meretricious and shallow. 

Yet there are men who, professing to speak in the interests 
of the poor, of true learning, and of sound philosophy, inveigh 
against a system like that which in Michigan opens the doors of 
all learning to the humblest as well as to the richest child, and 
insist that we shall make every one pay to the full the cost of 
his high school and university education. Do they not see that 
this would be a matter of little consequence to the rich, who 
could easily secure their training at any expense, but that it 
would consign the poor children, however endowed with talent, 
to the humblest acquisitions of learning or to the most trying 
struggle to attain to true culture? It is in the interest of the 
poor, it is in the interest of true and enlightened democracy, 
that we insist that the highest education shall be accessible to 
all classes. 

The most democratic atmosphere in the world is that of the 
college. There all meet on absolutely equal terms. No- 



— 11 — 

where else do the accidents of birth or condition count for so 
little. The son of the millionaire has no advantage over the 
son of the washerwoman or over the liberated slave, who has 
hardly clothes enough to cover his nakedness. Kowhere in 
the world is a man so truly weighed and estimated by his 
brains and his character. God forbid that the day should 
ever come when the spirit of snobbishness or aristocracy or 
pride of wealth should rule in our college halls. 

Talk about oppressing the poor by sustaining the Univer- 
sity! It is the sons and daughters of the men who are poor or 
of very moderate means who form the great majority of the 
students here and in almost every institution of higher learning. 
I could move your hearts to pity or to admiration if I could call 
one after another of many whom I see before me on this occa- 
sion to come up here and tell what toils they have performed for 
long and weary years, what hardships and privations they and 
their parents have endured to gather up the few hundreds of 
dollars needed to maintain them with the closest and most 
pinching economy during their few years of residence here. 
I hope that those who practice high thinking and plain liv- 
ing will always be in the majoiity on these grounds. Sad, 
indeed, will it be for the University and sad for the State when 
such as they cannot by manly effort secure to themselves the 
best help which the resources of this school can offer to them. 

Anything more hateful, more repugnant to our natural in- 
stincts, more calamitous at once to learning and to the people, 
more unrepublican, more undemocratic, more unchristian than a 
system which should confine the priceless boon of higher educa- 
tion to the rich I cannot conceive. 

Have an aristocracy of birth if you will, or of riches, if 
you wish, but give our plain boys from the log cabins a chance 
to develop their minds with the best learning, and we will fear 
nothing from your aristocracy. It will speedily become either 
ridiculous or harmless, or, better still, will be stimulated to 
intellectual activity by learning that in the fierce competitions 
of life something besides blue blood or inherited wealth is 
LcrfC. 



— 12 — 

needed to compete with the brains and character from the 
cabins. 

4. Another cogent reason for opening the privileges of 
higher education to all classes in this country is found in our 
distribution of political power throughout the community. The 
largest part of the public action which most concerns us is taken 
or determined by local organizations. The successful working 
of our republican system depends upon the distribution through 
the smaller towns and villages and through the rural districts of 
men of intelligence. If all the cultivated minds were concen- 
trated in one capital or in a few great cities, we could not per- 
petuate our form of government. Any strong tendency toward 
such a result must seriously interfere with the purity and 
efficiency of our institutions. 

We need, therefore, to reach with our best training men 
drawn from all classes, from all pursuits in life, and men who 
are to return to all honorable and worthy vocations, not alone 
in the great cities, but in all parts of the land. It is by this 
diffusion of the educated men, and by the diffusion through 
them of the direct and indirect advantages of education among 
the inhabitants of every town and hamlet, that a great school of 
learning does its highest work and justifies its claim to support 
by the whole people. It disseminates over the whole State men 
who are trained to be intelligent leaders of thought, to enlighten 
their neighbors on important affairs, to expose the fallacies of 
charlatans in politics, science, and religion, to keep alive an in- 
terest in education, to discharge all the duties of citizenship, 
and, if need be, of public office. It thus keeps the whole body 
politic vigorous and healthy with the life-giving currents which 
it sends to the extremities, as well as with the strength which it 
lends to the heart. It is not true that it blesses only the men 
who receive its degrees. Through them it blesses all around 
them. Its graduates are often the medium of greater blessings 
to others than to themselves. Mark the venerable physician, 
who, trained to the highest professional skill in its halls, has 
ministered with unselfish devotion for a generation to the sick 



._ u -'- 

and suffering. Has he or have they been most blessed by his 
education ? Take the lawyer, whose advice for years the widow, 
the orphan, the poor haA e instinctively sought, whose opposition 
the criminal has dreaded, whose counsel and guidance the town, 
the county, the public have always desired in every emergency; 
has his power been only or chiefly a good fortune to himself ? 
In a large sense it is true that the advantages of the higher 
education cannot be selfishly monopolized by the recipient of it. 
It is not truly enjoyed, it can hardly be used in any honor- 
able way without conferring benefits on others. You might 
as well talk of the sun monopolizing and enjoying alone the 
light which is generated in it as talk of a scholar monopol- 
izing the advantages of his education. The moment the sun 
shines, the wide universe around is bathed in its life-giving- 
beams. Intellectual activity is necessarily luminous, outgoing, 
diffusive, reproductive. The graduates who are going out from 
this University are not taking with them hidden treasures to 
enjoy in secret as the miser gloats in the solitude of his garret 
over his gold, but rather precious seed which they will sow in 
every town and hamlet of this broad State, while the thousands 
about them will share with them the harvest of their sowing. 

I need hardly say that any system which should confine the 
best education to the rich would greatly curtail this diffusion of 
the blessings of education, and would, doubtless, tend to con- 
centrate the educated men almost entirely in the great cities. Is 
it too much to say that it would tend to political centralization 
and to a loss of the inestimable advantages which flow from 
the wise and vigorous local administration of public affairs, 
and from the comparative homogeueousness in our society 
caused by the distribution of educated men throughout our 
communities ? 

5. The general opinion of mankind in all Christian lands 
has favored some plan of bringing liberal education within the 
reach of the men of humble means. It has been reserved for 
these latter days to make the discovery that there is danger in 
thus opening the fountains of learning to the poor as well as 



^ 14 -- 

rich. For the most part the direction of education has been in 
the hands of the church. Now whatever criticism may be made 
upon the church through these eighteen centuries, she has with 
impartial handheld wide open to men of high and of low degree 
alike the gates to generous learning. She has encouraged and 
persuaded the rich to endow her schools and colleges and uni- 
versities, so that the instruction might be almost, if not entirely, 
free. She has taught them to found scholarships and fellow- 
ships, which would enable the poorest boy to spend the best 
years of his youth and manhood in the still air of delightful 
study. 

The rulers of every nation of Europe have cherished their 
great schools of learning as the choicest jewels in their crowns. 
Tliey have lavished wealth on them and endowed them so richly 
that at most of them the cost of instruction is little more than 
nominal, and peasants and princes are found on the same bench 
listening to the lectures of the great scholars in every science. 
What glorious monuments of wise generosity these universities 
have been! Royal houses have risen and disappeared, kingdoms 
have come and gone, the map of Europe has been made and 
re-made again and again, but the great medieval schools, to 
whose halls centuries ago thousands of eager scholars 
trooped from all parts of Europe, still stand fresh in eternal 
youth, welcoming with princely hospitality poor and rich to 
their halls, pouring out their streams of blessing from genera- 
tion to generation and from age to age, with a flow as copious 
and as unceasing as the Danube or the Rhine. If we may judge 
by the past, what work of man is more enduring or more bene- 
ficent than a strong university? 

In this country, too, where the early settlers began to lay 
the foundation of our most venerable university before they had 
made comfortable homes for themselves, we find public and pri- 
vate generosity vieing in supplying the wants of the infant col- 
lege. While the colonial authorities voted appropriations, we see 
the self-denying men and women stripping their scanty libraries 
of books and their ill-supplied tables of crockery to equip the 



— 15 — 

struggling institution, whither the sons of all might repair to 
be trained for every worthy work in State and church Contri- 
butions were solicited for the maintenance of poor students, so 
that, to borrow the language of an early president to the United 
Commissioners of the Colonies, " the commonwealth may be fur- j 
nished with knowing and understanding men and the chnrch ' 
with an able ministry." 

From that time to this it has been the aim of the guardians 
of that ancient university, and of every college which has been 
established in the land, to furnish education at such a rate that 
boys of modest means could procure it. Not one such institu- 
tion has been administered on the theory that the students 
should pay the full cost of the education furnished. Endow- 
ments and scholarships have been sought and secured. In 
some cases so liberal provision has been made that prudent 
students, it is reported, have actually been able to meet their 
expenses and lay aside a balance. In some parts of the 
country, it is said, there has sprung up between colleges an un- 
seemly competition in securing students by bidding for them 
with pecuniary temptations. But these abuses and indiscre- 
tions at least show how deep-seated is the conviction in the 
American mind that poverty shall not keep a gifted youth 
from the opportunity for a liberal education. This conviction 
is happily so firmly rooted there need be no fear that it will be 
conquered by the laissez aller theory, which would make no spe- 
cial provision for placing the higher education within the reach 
of those who cannot defray the full expenses of it. 

But from that section of the country which is most amply 
provided with privately endowed colleges, even from those 
States whose oldest colleges were established, or in their early 
days assisted, by legislative appropriations, we sometimes hear 
exception taken to the method by which this and other West- 
ern universities have been endowed and sustained, namely, by 
grants of land and by taxation. The educational problem be- 
fore the early settlers of Michigan and other Western States 
was peculiar. These States were occupied rapidly and for the 



— 16-= 

most part by men and women who had been well trained iri 
schools and colleges. They were extremely desirous that their 
children should be thoroughly educated. The National Govern- 
ment had given them an endowment with which to begin a uni- 
versity. They had energy, ambition, a love of intelligence, but 
they had little ready means for the planting of colleges. They 
saw plainly that to build up by private benefactions a iirst-rate 
school of higher learning, like the best in the East, would re- 
quire here, as it had required there, a hundred years of toil. 
Meanwhile, their children and their children's children would 
have passed away. Two or three generations must live and die 
without the facilities for training which a strong and thoroughly 
equipped school could furnish. Was there any question what 
they ought to do ? Plainly, the wise policy for them Avas to 
avail themselves of the national endowment, and then, if need 
be, to supplement it as prosperity should bring the State ampler 
means. 

It was not until 1867, when the University had already l)e- 
come strong and renowned, when the pupils were more numer- 
ous than those of any other institution in the land, that the 
State was called to give the first penny to its support, and then 
the whole appropriation was |15,000 a year, which was just 
l-20th of a mill tax on the appraisal of the taxable property of 
this rich Commonwealth. The total sum received by tax for the 
University and drawn from the State treasury down to January, 
^819, is in round numbers $469,000. If we compute this as 
distributed over the entire time since the foundation of the Uni- 
versity we shall find that it is an average of |1 2,000 a year, or 
l-52d of a mill on the present valuation. A man who is taxed 
on $1,000 would pay not quite two cents a year. This is the 
oppressive burthen which the University has laid on the 
tax-payer for the support of an institution which brings tlie 
treasures of the best knowledge to his children and to yours. 

The grounds upon which taxation for the support of the 
j higher education justly rests were so ably set forth by the dis- 
' tinguished orator of last year, whose eloquent words are still 



ringing in our ears, that it Avould be superfluous for me to dwell 
upon them at this time. I am now aiming merely to remind 
5^ou that at an expenditure which it is simply ridiculous to call 
burdensome, this prosperous State of Michigan has, through the 
wisdom of her founders, succeeded in furnishing the higher 
education to all her sons and daughters, without distinction of 
birth, race, color, or wealth. The fathers acted with a wise and 
far-seeing statesmanship. They saved to the State three gener- 
ations of educated men. Most of them lived to see such a 
supply of buildings, libraries, scientific collections, and other 
apparatus of a university here as could not by private endow- 
ments have been secured perhaps in a century. Indeed it is 
probable that private endowments would have been scattered 
among many small colleges, as they have been in other States, 
and that no institution at all comparable to this in strength 
would have grown up in Michigan. By planting the University 
so early, they have enriched every profession and nearly every 
vocation in Michigan with intelligent and well-equipped men. 
Through this school of learning they have attracted to the 
State a large number of brilliant and scholarly youth, Avho after 
the completion of their studies have chosen this Commonwealth 
as their home, and are adorning every calling in life. Is there 
any one act of our fathers by which they have done more to 
promote the prosperity of the State, to make its name known 
and honored throughout this land and beyond the sea, than by 
the establishment of a university in which the best learning of 
the times should be practically open to all so that whoever 
would might come and take freely, almost without money and 
without price ? 

Regal, indeed, are the gifts of nature to Michigan. A soil 
which bountifully rewards the toil of the husbandman and 
yearly fills to overflowing his granaries and barns; a climate so 
propitious that a large part of the State is a veritable paradise 
of fruits, where Heaven kindly draws the sting of frost from 
the west wind so that the breezes fall soft as the gales of 
Eden on the peach and the pear and the grape; mines richer in 



, — 18 — 

enduring wealth than those of Golconda; forests still magnifi- 
cent in primeval grandeur, and rivaling the mines in value; salt 
wells which yield the wealth of subterranean seas in inexhaust- 
ible and unceasing stream; the broad lakes bound by the hand 
of God around the State like a zone of beauty; the sky, the 
inland seas, the earth, nay, the waters under the earth, all com- 
bine to pour their richest contributions into the lap of this 
favored Commonwealth. 

Yet, with all these riches, poor indeed had been the State 
had not a brave, and manly, and intelligent people chosen it as 
their home. For earth, and sky, and water, and mine had all 
been here for ages. But savages could not of these make a 
prosperous commonwealth. It is intelligence and character 
alone which can make a great and thriving State. And so the 
grave question which pressed itself on the fathers still forces 
itself on us. How shall we train our children to make the most 
of these conspicuous advantages, to build a State which shall be 
truly great, to contribute their full part to the honor and glory 
of the nation, to lead happy and useful lives, to be a blessing 
to mankind? Can we do better than to answer this question in 
the spirit in which they answered it when, in accordance with 
the direction of the Ordinance of '87, they took care that schools 
and the means of education should be forever encouraged, and 
laid deep and strong the foundations of school and university ? 

We may be pardoned for believing that the result in our own 
State has justified what we may call the Michigan policy. We 
cling to it still. But whatever be the method of endowment of 
our great schools, may the day never come when they shall be 
inaccessible to the humblest youth in whom God has lodged the 
divine spark of genius, or that more common but sometimes not 
less serviceable gift of useful talent. Let not a misapplication of 
the lausez faire doctrine in political economy, which has its proper 
place, lead us to the fatal mistake of building up a pedantic 
aristocracy. Good learning is always catholic and generous. It 
welcomes the humblest votary of science, and bids him kindle 
his lamp freely at the common shrine. It frowns on caste and 



— 19 — 

bigotry. It spurns the artificial distinctions of conventional 
society. It greets all comers whose intellectual gifts entitle 
them to admission to the goodly fellowship of cultivated minds. 
It is essentially democratic in the best sense of that term. In 
justice, then, to the true spirit of learning, to the best interests 
of society, to the historic life of this State, let us now hold wide 
open the gates of this University to all our sons and daughters, 
rich or poor, whom God by gifts of intellect and by kindly 
providences has called to seek for a liberal education. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 933 542 2 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 933 542 2 



